8. A DEPARTURE
IT is a very fine thing to be a real Prince. There are points
about a Pirate Chief, and to succeed to the Captaincy of a Robber
Band is a truly magnificent thing. But to be an Heir has also
about it something extremely captivating. Not only a long-lost
heir—an heir of the melodrama, strutting into your hitherto
unsuspected kingdom at just the right moment, loaded up with the
consciousness of unguessed merit and of rights so long
feloniously withheld—but even to be a common humdrum domestic
heir is a profession to which few would refuse to be apprenticed.
To step from leading-strings and restrictions and one glass of
port after dinner, into property and liberty and due
appreciation,
saved up, polished and varnished, dusted and laid in lavender,
all expressly for you—why, even the Princedom and the Robber
Captaincy, when their anxieties and responsibilities are
considered, have hardly more to offer. And so it will continue
to be a problem, to the youth in whom ambition struggles with a
certain sensuous appreciation of life's side-dishes, whether the
career he is called upon to select out of the glittering knick-knacks that strew the counter had better be that of an heir or an
engine-driver.
In the case of eldest sons, this problem has a way of solving
itself. In childhood, however, the actual heirship is apt to
work on the principle of the "Borough-English" of our happier
ancestors, and in most cases of inheritance it is the youngest
that succeeds. Where the "res" is "angusta," and the weekly
books are simply a series of stiff hurdles at each of which in
succession
the paternal legs falter with growing suspicion of their powers
to clear the flight, it is in the affair of
clothes that the right of succession tells,
and "the hard heir strides about the land" in trousers long ago
framed for fraternal limbs—
frondes novas et
non sua poma. A bitter thing indeed! Of those pretty
silken threads that knit humanity together, high and low, past
and present, none is tougher, more pervading, or more iridescent,
than the honest, simple pleasure of new clothes. It tugs at the
man as it tugs at the woman; the smirk of the well-fitted prince
is no different from the smirk of the Sunday-clad peasant; and
the veins of the elders tingle with the same thrill that sets
their fresh-frocked grandchildren skipping. Never trust people
who pretend that they have no joy in their new clothes.
Let not our souls be wrung, however, at contemplation of the
luckless urchin cut
off by parental penury from the rapture of new clothes. Just as
the heroes of his dreams are his immediate seniors, so his
heroes' clothes share the glamour, and the reversion of them
carries a high privilege—a special thing not sold by Swears and
Wells. The sword of Galahad—and of many another hero—arrived
on the scene already hoary with history, and the boy rather
prefers his trousers to be legendary, famous, haloed by his
hero's renown—even though the nap may have altogether vanished
in the process.
But, putting clothes aside, there are other matters in which
this reversed heirship comes into play. Take the case of Toys.
It is hardly right or fitting—and in this the child quite
acquiesces—that as he approaches the reverend period of nine or
say ten years, he should still be the unabashed and proclaimed
possessor of a hoop and a Noah's Ark. The child
will quite see the reasonableness of this, and, the goal of his
ambition being now a catapult, a pistol, or even a sword-stick,
will be satisfied that the titular ownership should lapse to his
juniors, so far below him in their kilted or petticoated incompetence.
After all, the things are still there, and if relapses
of spirit occur, on wet afternoons, one can still (nominally)
borrow them and be happy on the floor as of old, without the
reproach of being a habitual baby toy-caresser. Also one can
pretend it's being done to amuse the younger ones.
None of us, therefore, grumbled when in the natural course of
things the nominal ownership of the toys slipped down to Harold,
and from him in turn devolved upon Charlotte. The toys were
still there; they always had been there and always would be
there, and when the nursery door was fast shut there were no
Kings or
Queens or First Estates in that small Republic on the floor.
Charlotte, to be sure, chin-tilted, at last an owner of real
estate, might patronize a little at times; but it was tacitly
understood that her "title " was only a drawing-room one.
Why does a coming bereavement project no thin faint voice, no
shadow of its woe, to warn its happy, heedless victims? Why
cannot Olympians ever think it worth while to give some hint of
the thunderbolts they are silently forging? And why, oh, why did
it never enter any of our thick heads that the day would come
when even Charlotte would be considered too matronly for toys?
One's so-called education is hammered into one with rulers and
with canes. Each fresh grammar or musical instrument, each new
historical period or quaint arithmetical rule, is impressed on
one by some painful physical prelude. Why does Time, the biggest
Schoolmaster,
alone neglect premonitory raps, at each stage of his curriculum,
on our knuckles or our heads?
Uncle Thomas was at the bottom of it. This was not the first
mine he had exploded under our bows. In his favourite pursuit of
fads he had passed in turn from Psychical Research to the White
Rose and thence to a Children's Hospital, and we were being daily
inundated with leaflets headed by a woodcut depicting Little
Annie (of Poplar) sitting up in her little white cot, surrounded
by the toys of the nice, kind, rich children. The idea caught on
with the Olympians, always open to sentiment of a treacly,
woodcut order; and accordingly Charlotte, on entering one day
dishevelled and panting, having been pursued by yelling Redskins
up to the very threshold of our peaceful home, was curtly
informed that her French lessons would begin on Monday, that she
was
henceforth to cease all pretence of being a trapper or a Redskin
on utterly inadequate grounds, and moreover that the whole of her
toys were at that moment being finally packed up in a box, for
despatch to London, to gladden the lives and bring light into the
eyes of London waifs and Poplar Annies.
Naturally enough, perhaps, we others received no official
intimation of this grave cession of territory. We were not
supposed to be interested. Harold had long ago been promoted to a
knife—a recognized, birthday knife. As for me, it was known
that I was already given over, heart and soul, to lawless
abandoned catapults—catapults which were confiscated weekly for
reasons of international complications, but with which Edward
kept me steadily supplied, his school having a fine old tradition
for excellence in their manufacture. Therefore no one was
supposed to be
really affected but Charlotte, and even she had already reached
Miss Yonge, and should therefore have been more interested in
prolific curates and harrowing deathbeds.
Nothwithstanding, we all felt indignant, betrayed, and sullen
to the verge of mutiny. Though for long we had affected to despise
them, these toys, yet they had grown up with us, shared our
joys and our sorrows, seen us at our worst, and become part of
the accepted scheme of existence. As we gazed at untenanted
shelves and empty, hatefully tidy corners, perhaps for the first
time for long we began to do them a tardy justice.
There was old Leotard, for instance. Somehow he had come to
be sadly neglected of late years—and yet how exactly he always
responded to certain moods! He was an acrobat, this Leotard, who
lived in a glass-fronted box. His loose
jointed limbs were cardboard, cardboard his slender trunk; and
his hands eternally grasped the bar of a trapeze. You turned the
box round swiftly five or six times; the wonderful unsolved
machinery worked, and Leotard swung and leapt, backwards,
forwards, now astride the bar, now flying free; iron-jointed,
supple-sinewed, unceasingly novel in his invention of new,
unguessable attitudes; while above, below, and around him, a
richly-dressed audience, painted in skilful perspective of
stalls, boxes, dress-circle, and gallery, watched the thrilling
performance with a stolidity which seemed to mark them out as
made in Germany. Hardly versatile enough, perhaps, this Leotard;
unsympathetic, not a companion for all hours; nor would you have
chosen him to take to bed with you. And yet, within his own
limits, how fresh, how engrossing, how resourceful and inventive!
Well, he was gone, it seemed—
merely gone. Never specially cherished while he tarried with us,
he had yet contrived to build himself a particular niche of his
own. Sunrise and sunset, and the dinner-bell, and the sudden
rainbow, and lessons, and Leotard, and the moon through the
nursery windows—they were all part of the great order of things,
and the displacement of any one item seemed to disorganize the
whole machinery. The immediate point was, not that the world
would continue to go round as of old, but that Leotard wouldn't.
Yonder corner, now swept and garnished, had been the stall
wherein the spotty horse, at the close of each laborious day, was
accustomed to doze peacefully the long night through. In days of
old each of us in turn had been jerked thrillingly round the room
on his precarious back, had dug our heels into his unyielding
sides, and had scratched our hands on the
tin tacks that secured his mane to his stiffly-curving neck.
Later, with increasing stature, we came to overlook his merits as
a beast of burden; but how frankly, how good-naturedly, he had
recognized the new conditions, and adapted himself to them without
a murmur! When the military spirit was abroad, who so ready
to be a squadron of cavalry, a horde of Cossacks, or artillery
pounding into position? He had even served with honour as a gun-boat, during a period when naval strategy was the only theme; and
no false equine pride ever hindered him from taking the part of a
roaring locomotive, earth-shaking, clangorous, annihilating time
and space. Really it was no longer clear how life, with its
manifold emergencies, was to be carried on at all without a
fellow like the spotty horse, ready to step in at critical
moments and take up just the part required of him.
In moments of mental depression, nothing
is quite so consoling as the honest smell of a painted animal;
and mechanically I turned towards the shelf that had been so long
the Ararat of our weather-beaten Ark. The shelf was empty, the
Ark had cast off moorings and sailed away to Poplar, and had
taken with it its haunting smell, as well as that pleasant sense
of disorder that the best conducted Ark is always able to impart.
The sliding roof had rarely been known to close entirely. There
was always a pair of giraffe-legs sticking out, or an elephant-trunk, taking from the stiffness of its outline, and reminding us
that our motley crowd of friends inside were uncomfortably
cramped for room and only too ready to leap in a cascade on the
floor and browse and gallop, flutter and bellow and neigh, and be
their natural selves again. I think that none of us ever really
thought very much of Ham and Shem and Japhet. They were only
there
because they were in the story, but nobody really wanted them.
The Ark was built for the animals, of course—animals with tails,
and trunks, and horns, and at least three legs apiece, though
some unfortunates had been unable to retain even that number.
And in the animals were of course included the birds—the dove,
for instance, grey with black wings, and the red-crested
woodpecker—or was it a hoo-poe?—and the insects, for there was
a dear beetle, about the same size as the dove, that held its own
with any of the mammalia.
Of the doll-department Charlotte had naturally been sole chief
for a long time; if the staff were not in their places to-day, it
was not I who had any official right to take notice. And yet one
may have been member of a Club for many a year without ever
exactly understanding the use and object of the other members,
until one
enters, some Christmas day or other holiday, and, surveying the
deserted armchairs, the untenanted sofas, the barren hat-pegs,
realizes, with depression, that those other fellows had their
allotted functions, after all. Where was old Jerry? Where were
Eugenie, Rosa, Sophy, Esmeralda? We had long drifted apart, it
was true, we spoke but rarely; perhaps, absorbed in new
ambitions, new achievements, I had even come to look down on
these conservative, unprogressive members who were so clearly
content to remain simply what they were. And now that their
corners were unfilled, their chairs unoccupied—well, my eyes
were opened and I wanted 'em back!
However, it was no business of mine. If grievances were the
question, I hadn't a leg to stand upon. Though my catapults were
officially confiscated, I knew the drawer in which they were
incarcerated,
and where the key of it was hidden, and I could make life a
burden, if I chose, to every living thing within a square-mile
radius, so long as the catapult was restored to its drawer in due
and decent time. But I wondered how the others were taking it.
The edict hit them more severely. They should have my moral
countenance at any rate, if not more, in any protest or
countermine they might be planning. And, indeed, something
seemed possible, from the dogged, sullen air with which the two
of them had trotted off in the direction of the raspberry-canes.
Certain spots always had their insensible attraction for certain
moods. In love, one sought the orchard. Weary of discipline,
sick of convention, impassioned for the road, the mining camp,
the land across the border, one made for the big meadow.
Mutinous, sulky, charged with plots and conspiracies,
one always got behind the shelter of the raspberry-canes.
. . . . . . .
"You can come too if you like," said Harold, in a subdued sort
of way, as soon as he was aware that I was sitting up in bed
watching him. "We didn't think you'd care, 'cos you've got to
catapults. But we're goin' to do what we've settled to do, so
it's no good sayin' we hadn't ought and that sort of thing, 'cos
we're goin' to!"
The day had passed in an ominous peacefulness. Charlotte and
Harold had kept out of my way, as well as out of everybody
else's, in a purposeful manner that ought to have bred suspicion.
In the evening we had read books, or fitfully drawn ships and
battles on fly-leaves, apart, in separate corners, void of
conversation or criticism, oppressed by the lowering tidiness of
the universe, till bedtime
came, and disrobement, and prayers even more mechanical than
usual, and lastly bed itself without so much as a giraffe under
the pillow. Harold had grunted himself between the sheets with
an ostentatious pretence of overpowering fatigue; but I noticed
that he pulled his pillow forward and propped his head against
the brass bars of his crib, and, as I was acquainted with most of
his tricks and subterfuges, it was easy for me to gather that a
painful wakefulness was his aim that night.
I had dozed off, however, and Harold was out and on his feet,
poking under the bed for his shoes, when I sat up and grimly
regarded him. Just as he said I could come if I liked, Charlotte
slipped in, her face rigid and set. And then it was borne in
upon me that I was not on in this scene. These youngsters had
planned it all out, the piece was their own,
and the mounting, and the cast. My sceptre had fallen, my rule
had ceased. In this magic hour of the summer night laws went for
nothing, codes were cancelled, and those who were most in touch
with the moonlight and the warm June spirit and the topsy-turvydom that reigns when the clock strikes ten, were the true
lords and lawmakers.
Humbly, almost timidly, I followed without a protest in the
wake of these two remorseless, purposeful young persons, who were
marching straight for the schoolroom. Here in the moonlight the
grim big box stood visible—the box in which so large a portion
of our past and our personality lay entombed, cold, swathed in
paper, awaiting the carrier of the morning who should speed them
forth to the strange, cold, distant Children's Hospital, where
their little failings would all be misunderstood and no one would
make allowances. A dreamy spectator, I stood idly by while
Harold propped up the lid and the two plunged in their arms and
probed and felt and grappled.
"Here's Rosa," said Harold, suddenly. "I know the feel of her
hair. Will you have Rosa out?"
"Oh, give me Rosa!" cried Charlotte with a sort of gasp. And
when Rosa had been dragged forth, quite unmoved apparently,
placid as ever in her moonfaced contemplation of this comedy-world with its ups and downs, Charlotte retired with her to the
window-seat, and there in the moonlight the two exchanged their
private confidences, leaving Harold to his exploration alone.
"Here's something with sharp corners," said Harold, presently.
"Must be Leotard, I think. Better let
him go."
"Oh, yes, we can't save Leotard," assented Charlotte, limply.
Poor old Leotard! I said nothing, of course; I was not on in
this piece. But, surely, had Leotard heard and rightly
understood all that was going on above him, he must have sent up
one feeble, strangled cry, one faint appeal to be rescued from
unfamiliar little Annies and retained for an audience certain to
appreciate and never unduly critical.
"Now I've got to the Noah's Ark," panted Harold, still groping
blindly.
"Try and shove the lid back a bit," said Charlotte, "and pull
out a dove or a zebra or a giraffe if there's one handy."
Harold toiled on with grunts and contortions, and presently
produced in triumph a small grey elephant and a large beetle with
a red stomach.
"They're jammed in too tight," he complained. "Can't get any
more out. But as I came up I'm sure I felt Potiphar!" And down
he dived again.
Potiphar was a finely modelled bull with a
suede "skin, rough and comfortable and
warm in bed. He was my own special joy and pride, and I thrilled
with honest emotion when Potiphar emerged to light once more,
stout-necked and stalwart as ever.
"That'll have to do," said Charlotte, getting up. "We dursn't
take any more, 'cos we'll be found out if we do. Make the box
all right, and bring 'em along."
Harold rammed down the wads of paper and twists of straw he
had disturbed, replaced the lid squarely and innocently, and
picked up his small salvage; and we sneaked off for the window
most generally in use for prison-breakings and nocturnal
escapades. A few seconds later and we were hurrying silently in
single file along the dark edge of the lawn.
Oh, the riot, the clamour, the crowding chorus, of all silent
things that spoke by scent and colour and budding thrust and
foison, that moonlit night of June! Under the laurel-shade all
was still ghostly enough, brigand-haunted, crackling, whispering
of night and all its possibilities of terror. But the open
garden, when once we were in it—how it turned a glad new face to
welcome us, glad as of old when the sunlight raked and searched
it, new with the unfamiliar night-aspect that yet welcomed us as
guests to a hall where the horns blew up to a new, strange
banquet! Was this the same grass, could these be the same familiar
flower-beds, alleys, clumps of verdure, patches of sward? At
least this full white light that was flooding them was new, and
accounted for all. It was Moonlight Land, and Past-Ten-o'clock
Land, and we were in it and of it, and all its other denizens
fully understood, and, tongue-free and awakened at last,
responded and comprehended and knew. The other two, doubtless,
hurrying forward full of their mission, noted
little of all this. I, who was only a super, had leisure to take
it all in, and, though the language and the message of the land
were not all clear to me then, long afterwards I remembered and
understood.
Under the farthest hedge, at the loose end of things, where
the outer world began with the paddock, there was darkness once
again—not the blackness that crouched so solidly under the
crowding laurels, but a duskiness hung from far-spread arms of
high-standing elms. There, where the small grave made a darker
spot on the grey, I overtook them, only just in time to see Rosa
laid stiffly out, her cherry cheeks pale in the moonlight, but
her brave smile triumphant and undaunted as ever. It was a tiny
grave and a shallow one, to hold so very much. Rosa once in,
Potiphar, who had hitherto stood erect, stout-necked, through so
many days and such various weather, must needs bow
his head and lie down meekly on his side. The elephant and the
beetle, equal now in a silent land where a vertebra and a red
circulation counted for nothing, had to snuggle down where best
they might, only a little less crowded than in their native Ark.
The earth was shovelled in and stamped down, and I was glad
that no orisons were said and no speechifying took place. The
whole thing was natural and right and self-explanatory, and
needed no justifying or interpreting to our audience of stars and
flowers. The connexion was not entirely broken now—one link
remained between us and them. The Noah's Ark, with its cargo of
sad-faced emigrants, might be hull down on the horizon, but two
of its passengers had missed the boat and would henceforth be
always near us; and, as we played above them, an elephant would
understand, and a beetle
would hear, and crawl again in spirit along a familiar floor.
Henceforth the spotty horse would scour along far-distant plains
and know the homesickness of alien stables; but Potiphar, though
never again would he paw the arena when bull-fights were on the
bill, was spared maltreatment by town-bred strangers, quite
capable of mistaking him for a cow. Jerry and Esmeralda might
shed their limbs and their stuffing, by slow or swift degrees, in
uttermost parts and unguessed corners of the globe; but Rosa's
book was finally closed, and no worse fate awaited her than
natural dissolution almost within touch and hail of familiar
faces and objects that had been friendly to her since first she
opened her eyes on a world where she had never been treated as a
stranger.
As we turned to go, the man in the moon, tangled in elm-boughs, caught my eye for a moment, and I thought that never had
he looked so friendly. He was going to see after them, it was
evident; for he was always there, more or less, and it was no
trouble to him at all, and he would tell them how things were
still going, up here, and throw in a story or two of his own
whenever they seemed a trifle dull. It made the going away
rather easier, to know one had left somebody behind on the spot;
a good fellow, too, cheery, comforting, with a fund of anecdote;
a man in whom one had every confidence.
[The end]